Ryan Adams… hypocritically lectured by The Strokes!
At the beginning of Meet Me
In The Bathroom, Lizzy Goodman’s exhaustive and entertainingly gossipy oral history of the scene that coalesced around the Strokes’ brief blaze of notoriety, premillennial New York is portrayed as a rock’n’roll graveyard. In Rudy Giuliani’s sanitised dot.com town, “You couldn’t even buy drugs on the street anymore,” laments Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham. this sorry state of affairs is altered by 9/11, which begets a kind of desperate hedonism, and the return to the fundamental principles that energised the Lower East Side in the mid-to-late ’70s. For a spell, the combination lit a fuse under the city and beyond, resulting in some enjoyably urgent music, and the industry’s last great signing splurge before the internet swept in.
For those who’d argue that you had to be there, Goodman interviews pretty much everyone who was, creating a vast, overlapping narrative with the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol and James Murphy at the centre, and dozens of associated artists (from the White Stripes to Franz Ferdinand and Kings Of Leon) orbiting around them. By and large they’re a hopelessly self-infatuated bunch, entirely in love with their own mythology and a romanticised notion of New York City. “Blondie, Patti Smith, the Ramones, television…,” intones Yeah Yeah Yeahs Karen O. You’re struck by the orthodoxy of the inspirations and aspirations: guitars, suits, black leather jackets, art rock, cocaine and fame.
Playground beefs are laid out in hilarious detail, notably between Murphy and tim Goldsworthy – “I literally could have stabbed him in the throat quite easily,” says Goldsworthy – and Ryan Adams and the Strokes. Adams, it’s fair to say, doesn’t come out of the book looking terribly clever. One memorable chapter finds him being confronted by the Strokes at a High Noon summit in a downtown bar, where they accuse him of turning Albert Hammond Jr onto heroin. “It was very much in the style of The Godfather,” Adams recalls. “Where the family business is being attended to… I was given a lecture, a hypocritical lecture, and then they told me that I was not going to be part of their scene anymore.”
You can trace the arc of boom and bust through the drugs. It starts with weed and ecstasy, accelerates to cocaine, and ends in heroin. the main players crash and burn relatively quickly, leaving a few pretty vapour trails, their potential never quite alchemising into sustained greatness. In their wake comes the second wave of tamer, saner talents – Grizzly Bear, the National, Vampire Weekend – whose rise is mirrored by that of Brooklyn, and the hipster aesthetic of Williamsburg becoming NY’s “No 1 export to the world”.
the cleverly constructed text captures the excitement of it all exploding. It’s a sprawling testament, hilariously selfimportant, amusingly contradictory, a slice of music history that encompasses a punchy précis of the debauchery on tap at London’s Columbia Hotel, the impact of the smoking ban, and the victory of advertising, licensing and illegal downloads over radio, stores and labels. “WE just make a noise and that’s it, no politics, no nothing,” says Captain Sensible in Smashing It Up, Kieron tyler’s solid history of the Damned’s first decade (there’s a frantic coda on their tangled history since 1986). the unlovely runts of the litter, the Damned refused to buy into the punk aesthetic, yet the music was often great. From the still-potent rush of “New Rose” – “like jet fighters”, says Rat Scabies – to the souped-up garage rock of “Smash It Up” and hilariously grandiose “Eloise”, they were rarely predictable – Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason produced their messy second album, after Syd Barrett proved unavailable – and often thrilling.
the first punk band to release a single, they’re the last to get a thorough biographical study. Smashing It Up rectifies that, though the rather overwrought style takes the band more seriously than they ever took themselves. A gang of suburban misfits, they find themselves united by a “slightly brutal” bluntness in their attitude to the outside world. this, it becomes clear, is something of an understatement, as they set fire to Elvis Costello’s shoes and stick fag butts in his mouth while he sleeps, piss on people, and scare the Flamin’ Groovies into quitting a tour. the author recalls a week’s rehearsal on a narrowboat on the Kennet & Avon Canal: “All that had been brought on board was an air rifle and beer.”
Little wonder they struggle to hold it together. Stiffed by Stiff – “I wished I’d signed with someone bigger,” says Sensible, “they might have paid me” – they fall apart on an annual basis, but keep resurfacing in slightly altered form, eking out a hand-to-mouth existence flitting from prog to psychedelia, goth to ’50s rock’n’roll. It’s a ragged, disjointed tale, and tyler provides a decent service in telling it. graeme thomson